Code for San Francisco Site Relaunch

Published on Feb 5, 2018 by
Jesse Szwedko

If you are reading this post on codeforsanfrancisco.org, you may have noticed that it looks
a bit different than it has for the past two years. For the curious, this post explains why and how we’ve migrated from
the brigade-centric content management system (CMS), BrigadeHub, back to a static site
generator, Jekyll hosted, for now, on Github Pages.

The end of an era

With BrigadeHub being retired late last year, we needed to find a path forward for
hosting our site that would allow us to continue to make the changes we wanted to better convey to the world who we are
and what we do. Our primary desires were to:

Create additional static content describing the organization

Create additional content for members such as an index of resources

Have more control over the way events are displayed to make content, agendas and presentations, from each more
discoverable

But we didn’t want to lose the raison d’être of BrigadeHub, namely, allowing non-technical users to edit content easily.

The path forward

Starting with our first leadership
council in
October, it was decided that we would look at the current state of static site generators
and headless CMSs to see if they could fit our needs. We felt that the static site
generators would give us a simple to maintain architucture and that the proliferation of headless CMSs would allow us to
maintain an interface for allowing non-technical users to help keep content on the site up-to-date.

We defined our goals as:

Should be editable by non-technical users

Should be simple in architecture to allow developers coming to the project to quickly contribute

Should be extensible to allow things like the project matching app to be overlaid

If you want to be involved in the organization of the brigade and decisions like this? Drop by our next monthly open
leadership councils on February 21st or join us in
#brigade on Slack.

Special thanks

I want to give special thanks to Oz Haven for his tireless efforts building and project
managing BrigadeHub. We would not be here today without his vision for expanding the the ability for brigade members to
contribute and curate content on our site. While BrigadeHub has been retired, this vision will carry on through our
work.

Also thank you to Jason Lally for heavily contributing to this discussion and for the
migration of projects to the new site.

Lastly, thank you to ChiHackNight for providing the initial template and site design which
we shamelessly replicated.